


Secret Ballots and Ugly Sweaters

by fraternite



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: 90 percent fluff 10 percent plot, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Christmas Party, Gen, Ugly Sweaters, a little bit of angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-19
Updated: 2013-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-05 03:33:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,129
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1089110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fraternite/pseuds/fraternite
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Amis decide to have a Christmas party.  Enjolras isn't quite comfortable with this idea, but not for the reason his friends would have guessed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Secret Ballots and Ugly Sweaters

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sunlight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunlight/gifts).



“No.  Absolutely not.”

“Come on, Enjolras.  Don’t be such a spoilsport.”

“Bah, humbug,” Jehan teased.

“No, I’m serious.  We are not having a Christmas party.  Christmas is a religious holiday, and it would be unfair to force all the members of our group to observe it.”

The Amis de l’ABC had only been meeting for a few months, and there were still some (okay, quite a few) details about the way their group worked to be ironed out.  Their relationship to the major religious and nonreligious holidays being one of them, apparently.

“Oh,” Courfeyrac’s face fell.  “Sorry, I wasn’t thinking of it that way.  I mean, my parents are atheists and we always celebrated Christmas.  But I guess coming from another perspective it would be different.”

“Hang on,” Bahorel said.  “I can’t speak for anyone else, but as long as you don’t make me sing carols, I am _more than_ all right with people giving me hot chocolate and cookies even if it’s for a holiday I don’t believe in.  I mean, after all, you guys celebrated with me when I brought in _baklawa_ for _Eid al-Fitr_ ; fair’s fair.”

“We could do a secret ballot,” Bossuet suggested.  “Write ‘yes’ or ‘no’ on pieces of paper and mix them up before opening them, in case someone is uncomfortable speaking against the idea in front of everyone.  The question being, are you personally okay with the idea of having a non-religious Christmas party as a group?”

“A joint Hanukkah-Christmas party,” Joly put in, with a nod to Combeferre, who smiled.

“That sounds okay,” Enjolras said, and nods around the table echoed him.

Jehan pulled a sheet of paper out of his notebook and started ripping it up.  “Okay, here are ballots.  And as a reminder, there is nothing wrong with saying you’re uncomfortable about the idea.  So--be honest!”  He smiled at everyone and slid the pile of paper squares down the table to Courfeyrac, keeping one in front of himself.

“Wait, which is ‘yes’ and which is ‘no’?”

“‘Yes’ is the one that starts with a Y, and ‘no’--” Grantaire began. Courfeyrac punched him in the arm.

“No, I mean is it ‘yes, I want to have a Christmas party’ or ‘yes, I would be uncomfortable with a Christmas party’?”

“The first,” Combeferre said, and Courfeyrac scribbled out his answer and wrote a new one.

Jehan pulled off Courfeyrac’s hat and went around the room collecting the folded squares of paper, shaking them up dramatically before setting them down in front of Combeferre.  One by one, Combeferre unfolded them and read them.

“All yes,” he reported.

“All right!”  Courfeyrac crowed.  “So: Plans?  Can it _please_ be an ugly sw--”

“No!” Enjolras cut in immediately.

 

In the end, they had declared Ugly Sweaters to be optional, but that didn’t stop Courfeyrac from providing a whole basket full of sweaters in varying sizes and degrees of ugliness, just in case someone came without one and decided to change their mind.  It was the first thing he pointed out to Enjolras as he came in, even before he offered to take the snacks he’d brought to the kitchen.

“I got this one specially for you, Enj,” he said, holding up a bright red sweater with a reindeer pattern in white.  “You don’t have to wear it if you don’t want it--hell, I’d wear this one in public any day.  But if you want it, it’s yours.”

The sweater looked comfortable--it was definitely used, not to the point of being threadbare, but just enough to get the department-store stiffness out of it--and it wasn’t even that ugly.  In fact, compared to the spangled monstrosity Courfeyrac was wearing (were those actual jingle bells on the reindeer’s collar?), it was fairly attractive.  But it was so goddamned Christmassy.

“I’ll pass, thanks,” Enjolras muttered.  Courfeyrac, to his relief, tossed the sweater in the basket and said no more, turning his attention to the chips and bean dip Enjolras had brought.

Enjolras almost took his decision back, though, when he saw that everyone who was there so far--Combeferre, Bossuet, Joly, Musichetta, and Feuilly--were wearing festive sweaters (Combeferre had managed to find one with a ludicrously vibrant menorah).

“Welcome!” Bossuet greeted him.  “Come join us, we’re--”

“Go!” Musichetta put in and everyone grabbed a letter tile from the pile in the middle.

“--we’re almost finished with this round and--”

“Go!”

“Damn it, Chetta!”

“Go!  And go!  And done.”

“--that is, we’re finished with this round and we’re not keeping score.”

“What would be the point?” Feuilly grumbled, and Musichetta beamed at him charmingly.

Enjolras took a seat next to Combeferre and helped to flip over all the letter tiles and reshuffle them in the center.  

“Here it is!”  Marius strode out of his bedroom wearing a sweater with a Christmas tree with _working flashing lights_.  Courfeyrac cheered in glee.

“Oh my _god_ , where did you get that?” Joly demanded.  “That has got to be the worst piece of clothing I have ever seen!”

“Are you sure?”  Bossuet leaned across Musichetta and whispered something in Joly’s ear that made him flush bright red.

“Shut up, Legles.”

“What did you say?” Courfeyrac demanded.

“The people want to know,” added Combeferre.

“How about another round?” Joly quickly said, and Feuilly backed him up.

The speed Scrabble game continued for twenty minutes more, as the rest of the guests trickled in--Grantaire and Jehan, smelling suspicious and very relaxed and full of holiday cheer, Cosette in a flurry of snow and snacks and gifts, Eponine and Bahorel, half an hour late and bearing two gallons of eggnog and the ugliest sweaters Enjolras had ever seen (Bahorel’s was light blue and depicted a pair of pajama-clad kittens trimming an old-fashioned Christmas tree with the words ‘O Tannenbaum’ across the top in gothic letters; Eponine’s, as far as Enjolras could tell, had been made entirely out of tinsel).

“Thank goodness you’re here,” Courfeyrac said.  “Chetta is kicking all our asses.”

“Excuse me,” Combeferre put in.  “I won last round.”

“That was a fluke, Ferre, she just happened to draw the j and the z and the q.”

Bossuet, leaning back out of Musichetta’s line of sight, mouthed, _You’re welcome, Ferre._

“Anyway, it’s time for the gift exchange,” Cosette said.  “I _really_ want to know what’s in that funny-shaped one Feuilly brought.”

“Everyone know the rules?” Courfeyrac asked as they gathered around the tree where the gifts had been piled.  “Everyone draws a number, you go in order.  On your turn you pick a gift and open it, and then you can either keep it or trade with anyone who’s gone before you.  If you take someone’s gift, they can keep the one you traded them, or steal from someone else, and so on and so on.  No gift can be stolen more than six times.  Okay?”

Marius had drawn number 1, so he began. He looked over the presents, avoiding the biggest ones (“Why don’t you take that huge one with the bows?” Courfeyrac asked him.  “No way, anyone who wraps a gift like that wants you to be excited about it--which means there’s something horrible inside.”), and finally picked a medium-sized box wrapped in dull green paper.

“Who brought this one?”

“Me,” Grantaire muttered, hiding his face in his cup.

Marius pulled off the paper and squinted down at the lilac-colored box.  “What is . . . oh my--”  His whole face flushed bright red and Grantaire almost fell out of his chair laughing.

“What is it?” Combeferre asked.  Marius mutely held up the box: A jumbo pack of 54 maximum-absorbency tampons.

Enjolras had never played this kind of gift exchange game, and, to be honest, he didn’t exactly see the point of it.  A gift exchange where you drew names and got a gift specifically for another person, that made sense--but how did you shop for a group of seven people with extremely different personalities and interests?  He’d settled for a big box of chocolate, hoping that a love of sweet things was a universal enough trait among the group.  

But as the game unfolded and a giant tin of popcorn (contributed by Bahorel) was stolen six times back and forth around the circle, to much hilarity as rivalries developed over it, he started to see the appeal of the exchange. Combeferre’s gift was an actual five-pound fruit cake; Eponine traded it to Bossuet for a giant red mug and assorted gourmet hot chocolate mixes.  Feuilly’s oddly-shaped present turned out to be a solid chocolate skull, and Jehan and Joly nearly came to blows over it.

Musichetta had the last number.  She opened the final gift--a package of maple-bacon flavored coffee--and, wrinkling her nose at it, looked around the circle to survey her options.

“Come on, hold them up,” Eponine urged, looking pointedly at Jehan, who was trying nonchalantly to conceal his chocolate skull under a corner of the Ugly Christmas Cardigan Courfeyrac had loaned him.

“Get the skull, Chetta,” Joly urged.

“No, keep the coffee,” Bossuet said.  “It’s maple bacon.  Bacon.”

“She doesn’t eat meat, you dork,” Joly laughed.

“Sometimes she makes exceptions,” Bossuet pointed out.

Musichetta ignored the heckling, taking her time to calmly examine the various collections of candy on offer, the set of silverware with birds for handles (Cosette held it a little closer as her friend’s eyes fell on it), the fruitcake, the eight-pack of boys’ socks with a different robot for each day of the week (plus one for “every day”), and the stack of old animated movies on VHS.  Then she stopped, grinning, in front of Marius and held out the coffee to him.

“Hand them over,” she said.

“Th-the . . . really?” he stammered.

“Well, of course--that’s ten dollars I’ve saved right there.  You can have this weird-ass coffee and welcome to it.”

“Thanks, Chetta,” he said, blushing.

“Are you kidding?  I had my eye on those from the moment you opened them up.”

“Well, thanks anyway.”  He held up the coffee and turned to the rest of the room.  “Hey--who wants to help me drink up this bacon-flavored coffee?”

 

By two a.m., the party was--not winding down, because nobody seemed to want to leave, especially not with the wind whipping sleet against the windows--but settling down.  At midnight, it had been all high-pitched hilarity, with Cosette and Musichetta belting out “All I Want for Christmas is You” and Marius anxiously (and ineffectually) shushing them for fear the neighbors would complain about the noise.  Combeferre and Feuilly, meanwhile, were arguing immigration policy with Enjolras and Grantaire, who were floundering a bit due to their astonishment of finding themselves on the same side of an argument for once, interrupting each other to finish the other’s sentences instead of contradict them.  Bahorel and Eponine were making out under the TV cabinet mistletoe (Courfeyrac had hung the sprigs of plastic leaves from lampshades and door knobs and faucets--everywhere except in doorways--and Eponine had taken it as a sort of challenge).  And the other four--Joly, Bossuet, Courfeyrac, and Jehan--were nursing their tingling feet after running across the snow-covered parking lot barefoot on a dare.

But later on things quieted considerably, with the help of a Christmas cartoon that brought nostalgic sighs from half the company and cynical snorts from Enjolras, and by two o’clock the partygoers were draped over the living room floor and furniture, nursing cups of eggnog and other beverages and waxing sentimental about the past year (probably at the encouragement of the doctoring Bossuet and Grantaire had done to said eggnog).

“I can’t believe we’ve only known each other a year--less than a year,” Jehan was saying.  “I feel so much closer to you than I could have imagined I would twelve months ago.”

“That’s right--it was just this January that most of us met,” Courfeyrac said.  “At that rally, the one where it snowed four inches and there were only like two dozen people there?”

“What if it had been eight inches like they were predicting and none of us made it?”  Joly said.  “I can’t imagine not knowing any of you.”

Enjolras felt it too: a swelling feeling of surprise and gratitude that so much could happen in a single year.  That this Christmas could be so different from last.

And then, looking around at his friends’ faces, it hit him: This would be what he thought of when he thought of the holidays, from now on.  Christmas trees would call to mind Marius’s freckled face, smiling sleepily over his still-flashing sweater.  Rudolph would remind him of Joly and Bossuet’s ridiculous impressions of all the voices in the movie.  Eggnog would be the taste of Grantaire saying “Come on, Enjolras, have a little more.  The-Saturday-Before-Christmas comes but once a year.”

And to his surprise and then dismay, he found the Christmas lights that Courfeyrac had strung from the ceiling going blurry.  He tried to find something interesting back toward the kitchen to glance at, but Courfeyrac had noticed.

“Enjolras, are you--is everything okay?”

He nodded, brushing the back of his hand over his eyes.  “Yeah.  Fine.”  But the others had seen now as well, and nobody was going to say anything if they thought he didn’t want to talk about it but now they thought he was upset or something--God, they probably thought he had a dying relative or something--and it was going to kill the mood unless he said something about it.  He was going to have to explain.

“Sorry.  It’s just--I’ve never liked Christmas.  That whole season.  It was . . . not a pleasant time in my house.  To me, Christmas meant listening to my parents tear my older brother apart at every meal for every single decision he’d made and everything he couldn’t help being.  I mean, they were always demanding and judgemental, you know that already, but at Christmas it was worse, especially since my brother was practically an adult so he’d had time to disappoint them more severely than I had yet.  So I always spent the holidays hating them for hurting him and hating him for making things so horrible, and worrying what I would do when my turn came to be torn into like that, and--  Anyway, ever since I was a kid, that’s all I could think of whenever I saw anything Christmassy.”

Courfeyrac was wringing his hands.  “Oh my god, Enj, I’m so sorry.  You should have said something, we would never have--”

He shrugged.  “It wasn’t a legitimate ideological objection, just my own stupid issues.”

“Hey, look,” Bossuet broke in.  “Everyone has issues and they are just as legitimate as ideological objections.  Things don’t have to be logical to be important.”

“Don’t pull that kind of crap again, Enjolras,” Cosette told him firmly.  “If something’s not okay, speak up.”

“Thanks,” Enjolras said, feeling a flush travel up his cheeks.  “But that’s not why I was--I’m not upset.  I just--I just realized that for the first time, I was actually enjoying a Christmas event.  And that I have a new set of holiday associations now.  It’s not that the bad memories are gone, but at least I have positive ones to focus on.  And it’s thanks to all of you, and I can’t say how much I . . . I . . .”  The dangerous quaver in his voice shut him up, and he had to brush at his eyes again.

“Me too, Enj.”  Enjolras looked up from his lap; Grantaire was addressing the group, the spark of self-mocking laughter absent from his eyes for once.  He twisted the napkin in his fingers.  “I mean, not the family stuff--at least, not the same family stuff.  Christmas was actually pretty okay in our house, sometimes better than the rest of the year.  But the rest of what you were saying--you guys mean a lot to me.

“I don’t know how anyone else feels, but to me, this group is like a family--like the way a family is supposed to be, not that we don’t have our issues, but that everyone cares about each other all the same.  And having you guys in my life has made a real difference to me.  It’s gotten me through a lot of shit that--well, I don’t know where I would be if it weren’t for you.  So, I guess, thank you.”

“Same,” Feuilly muttered very quietly.  He didn’t say anything else, but Enjolras could see tears glinting in his eyes as well.  Bossuet threw an arm around Feuilly’s shoulders.

There was a long silence that should have been awkward, coming as it was after a set of emotional confessions and punctuated with quiet sniffles from Enjolras--but somehow it wasn’t.  Through still-blurry eyes, Enjolras looked around at his friends, draped over Courfeyrac’s furniture and the floor and each other, and felt, for the moment, so . . . safe.

Then the laptop that had been playing an instrumental version of White Christmas in the background launched into (through the mysterious and unknowable ways of Internet Radio) “I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas” and the moment dissolved into laughter.

“Why is that song thumbed-up?” Combeferre asked.

“Are you kidding, that song is the best!” Joly said at the same time as Bossuet asked “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Anyone need a refill?” Grantaire asked, getting to his feet.  “There’s still about half a gallon of eggnog left.”

“Ooh, me, please?” Cosette handed him her mug.  “Thanks, R.”

Courfeyrac made his way over to Enjolras and enveloped him in a hug before Enjolras could protest.  “Hey, are you okay?” he asked quietly. “I really am sorry I pushed for this.  I should have seen that you weren’t happy with the idea.”

“No, really it’s okay.  I didn’t say anything.  I’m fine, I really am.”  He brushed at the last of the dampness on his cheeks.

“Enjolras, your hands are shaking,” Courfeyrac frowned.

He always got shaky when he talked about personal stuff like that in front of people.  It made no sense--he could give a political speech in front of a huge crowd without blinking an eye, but make him share his feelings with just a handful of close friends, and he became a trembling wreck.  How ridiculous.  “I’m just a little cold,” he said.

“I’ve got an extra sweater around here somewhere.  It might be a little ugly, but it’s cozy and festive,” Courfeyrac said, winking.  “No, but really, do you want to borrow a hoodie?  I have one that would fit you, I’m not sure how I even got it, ‘cause I look like a little kid in it, it’s so big on me.”

“Thanks, Courf,” Enjolras said.  “But the reindeer sweater will be fine.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> Yes Marius's sweater is shamelessly ripped off of--ahem, inspired by--juanjoltaire's drawing: http://juanjoltaire.tumblr.com/post/69573267436/for-angeolras-who-was-the-december-6th-advent.
> 
> I am sorry for the lack of romance and the excessive amount of ugly sweaters in this fic, but at least I know where my strengths lie.


End file.
